Eleanor:
Hello this is the next instillation of the podcast for the Feminist Translation Network. I’m Eleanor Fillingham, an intern for the Network, and I’m with Jennifer Ingleheart who is a professor of Latin at the University of Durham and is taking part in the translation tag event later today.
For those listening who are confused as to what a translation tag is: Josephine Balmer, a poet and translator, and Jennifer will discuss their translations of Sappho 31 and Catullus 51 in an event titled ‘Women translating men translating women’.
So, hello Jennifer. It’s nice to have you on [the podcast]. My first question is: what have you done to prepare for the translation tag for later today?
Jennifer:
Hi Eleanor and thank you for having me. It’s great to be here in lovely Norwich. I’ve never actually taken part in a translation tag before. It’s a new concept to me. But it’s really great that we’re looking at two poems that I’ve thought a lot about over many years. I’ve probably encountered Catullus 51, which is a translation of Sappho fragment 31, before I actually read the Sappho, which is a bit unexpected perhaps. And I’ve probably spent more time with the Catullus than the Sappho poem. But I’ve spent some time recently going back to the poems, looking at what Catullus is doing as a translator. And I suppose for the last nine months or so I’ve been thinking an awful lot about translation. So this event comes at a really interesting time for me. And Jo and I actually had a chat before the event – we had dinner last night and talked about a few of the things we’re going to be talking about later today: not just our own translations but what we’re doing with those poems and a bit about the poems themselves and what it means to translate as a feminist and to translate a man who’s taken over a woman’s voice as well.
Eleanor:
In terms of feminist translation, what would you say it is? – this can be either personally or in a broad sense.
Jennifer:
I guess I hadn’t really thought about feminist translation for a large part of my career. As classicists, we translate a lot, and we get students to translate, but normally when we’re getting students to translate in the classroom or in exams we’re really looking to see the students understood the grammar, the syntax, and can make a translation that’s quite literal and not very literary frankly. And I always knew that translation was more than just that. But it was when I came to Durham University actually in 2004 I got involved in teaching a first-year module called ‘Language, Translation and Interpretation’ with translation figured very broadly but we got students both those with the languages and without the languages to think very deeply about what it means to translate classical literature. And I put together a reading pack for the students to carry out an exercise where they had the Latin for the Pygmalion episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, some scholarly literature on that and then a number of different versions. What we got the students to do was to produce their own version – it could be something written or it could be much broader – of that episode. And I guess it was when I was doing that work with the students that I really started to think about the feminist aspect of translation. I mean the Pygmalion myth is one that’s inspired a lot of artists and raises an awful lot of questions when it comes to gender and power and how Pygmalion treats the statue that he sculpts. And the students really embraced getting involved with the Latin, even if they didn’t have the Latin, getting involved with the story that everyone knows – I mean, everyone’s seen My Fair Lady, right? Maybe? I don’t know! Well, they really really embraced doing that. And we assessed them by getting them to write an essay about their practice as a translator. And I think that seeing their various responses – both from male students, from female students […] it didn’t matter what gender someone was when they were writing their responses and writing about what they’d done – they were really engaging with the issues of gender that are raised. And many of them were taking an explicitly feminist angle, actually. And that’s really inspired me ever since to think about feminist translation I suppose.
Eleanor:
So, this is kind of an instance where you were teaching, and then feminist translation came up. But in terms of other experiences of teaching classical translation and practice, is there any way you try consciously to bring in feminist translation?
Jennifer:
It’s tricky because, as I said earlier, there is this sort of imperative when we’re teaching to make that the students understand what’s going on with the language and so literal translations are very much favoured. But I have encouraged students when they’ve come up with translations – I mean many classical texts say things about women, say things about gender, which look really terrible to modern audiences, and many students are alert to that dimension, but others are a bit more unthinking when they translate. So I do try and draw the attention of those students who perhaps translate in a way that they’re sort of taking on the prejudices of the male authors that they’re translating, I try to get them to think about things a little differently and we talk about those issues in the classroom when they’re translating as well.
Eleanor:
In terms of your own work, I’ve seen that you’ve done a lot with queer translations and the queer community. Are there any parallels between queer translation and feminist translation that you’ve seen?
Jennifer:
I think that there are a lot of parallels actually – I don’t really see the two as particularly separate from each other. I mean a lot of queer work is very interested in questions of gender, as is feminist work. I’ve probably been more involved in terms of my own practice, my own research, my own writing with the queer side of things, but I think it’s absolutely tied up with feminist approaches as well. I really find them hard to separate out actually.
Eleanor:
In terms of the event today with the Sappho translation, is that more, because I think of Sappho as one of the largest queer figures we have in classical history, did that play a part in your translation?
Jennifer:
Yeah I think we’re going to be talking about that aspect of Sappho quite a lot in the discussion that we’ll have later today, absolutely. I mean probably the two most famous queer figures – and you may say ‘what about x, y or z?’ but to my mind, they’re two of the most famous figures from antiquity, they come up again and again in reception – I’d say on the male side you’ve got Plato, and we’ve got Sappho. They’re two really, really important figures and it’s great. Often when we’re working with classical texts, unfortunately most of those texts are written by men. But with Sappho – one of the earliest, one of the most highly regarded classical figures we have – she’s a woman. And we get the modern word ‘lesbian’ because of her coming from the island of Lesbos.
Eleanor:
And sapphic as well.
Jennifer:
Absolutely, sapphic, yeah, a word which seems to be coming more into use in some queer circles today, absolutely.
Eleanor:
Especially because she’s such a giant in both circles: kind of feminism because the ‘Tenth Muse’, one of the only women from the past, the classical period, where we have a large body of work, and we hear about a lot, and the same with the queer community. It’s very interesting.
My next question is: is there anything notably different about translating classical texts with feminist techniques compared to modern texts that you’ve found?
Jennifer:
That’s a really great question! I might be able to give you a better answer after the event later today as my experience has been of translating classical texts. I’m a classist; my modern languages are not good enough to translate anything from a modern language. I suspect there are real differences for contemporary translators, in that probably when you’re producing a translation of a contemporary text, you’re the first person who’s producing that translation, whereas with classical texts that’s very much not the case. You’re aware that you’re coming in a long tradition of other writers who’ve translated that author. And often, when it comes to classical texts, it’s not just the case that we’re almost always dealing with male authors from antiquity but very often we’re dealing with male translators in the modern world as well. That’s quite different from the situation that I imagine most contemporary translators face.
Eleanor:
Do you ever find it intimidating that there are so many other people [who have translated these works] especially if you’re dealing with the Iliad, the Odyssey or Virgil?
Jennifer:
I think it’s hugely intimidating, actually. I sort of got into translating myself through looking at the translation history of Catullus. But when it actually came to producing my own versions, I didn’t want to look at anyone else’s versions. I mean, I had in the past – but I very consciously would not open up a book where someone else was translating Catullus. Yeah I think it’s really quite frightening to translate poems that have been translated so many times, often by really amazing translators. That’s quite an intimidating thing. But, then again, I wonder how Catullus felt when he sat down to translate Sappho 31. He was translating a poem by the ‘Tenth Muse’, as you said earlier. That’s a big deal – even for him. So I guess those sorts of anxieties have plagued translators throughout history. Although I’m not quite sure how anxious rather than competitive and overbearing Catullus is being, if I’m honest.
Eleanor:
I definitely would have thoughts on that but I’ll leave those. In terms of feminist translation, one part of some people’s method is leaving out some translations. I was wondering if – I know there’s been some quite sexist interpretations of various [texts] especially in the Iliad and Odyssey – are there any translations of works that you would ignore or look elsewhere because of this? Or would you be interested in comparing and saying ‘look this is how they translated this fifty years ago, this is how we do it now, this was influenced by the patriarchy [and state of society] at the time’, things like that?
Jennifer:
I think Emily Wilson has done some really interesting things on her translation of the Odyssey and how she’s very consciously departed from earlier male translators who, you know, have done things like make Helen call herself a bitch. And Emily has been very clear that she doesn’t want to do that. I think we, I wouldn’t want to cancel any translation as it were, but I think the important thing to do is to talk about where those translators were coming from and to see those translations in their context. Just as our translations are very much the product of our own contexts. We’re none of us free of the circumstances in which we live. I don’t think that there’s any such thing as a completely objective translation. I just don’t believe that’s possible actually.
Eleanor:
How do you find, kind of, the relationship between modern feminist translation and classical feminist translation? Because from my perspective I know that there are women in classical Greece that have voices but there’s far more men that have voices and I know that currently we live in this patriarchal society where there are a lot of times where men’s voices are heard a lot more than women’s. But in the past this was, I’d say from what I’ve seen, is completely elevated where women have almost no voice sometimes in classical reception. So how would you assess this?
Jennifer:
I think things are changing, actually. Josephine Balmer is going to be saying later today that when she came to translate Catullus she, translating Catullus as a woman, was a real anomaly. I don’t know if you know the Penguin volume of Catullus in English by Julia Haig Gaisser? It’s quite hard to get hold of. It’s really interesting. It’s got translations throughout the ages of Catullus by a huge variety of authors. It’s a great volume. And there are five or six women translators in the whole volume. So, Jo really was unusual in translating Catullus when she came to translate Catullus. But she’s not so unusual these days. There are actually an awful lot of women engaging with Catullus right now and generally a real surge of interest in the Classics from women creators of all kinds.
Eleanor:
Yeah, there’s been a lot of retellings in recent years and I think that’s good. But there’s some choices of myths that I’m a bit like I’m not sure I would have chosen that. But I think that’s really nice and getting Classics into more of the general population as I think it’s been quite an elite topic.
Jennifer:
I think it’s really important to get people into Classics. There’s no guarantee these days that people are going to be able to encounter Classics at schools. That’s the exception rather than the norm. And I think these retellings have been incredibly important for getting people into the Classics. I mean, when are you going to encounter the Classics?
Eleanor:
Especially with things like translation because not many people I know, know any Greek or Latin. When my grandma went to school, Latin was taught in state schools. But I don’t think, I’ve not really encountered many people who’ve gone to state schools who have encountered Latin or Greek. So getting people interested in Classics is good for getting people interested in translation and then feminist translation hopefully.
Jennifer:
Yeah, absolutely really opening up all kinds of vistas there, definitely. I mean, organisations like Classics for All are doing amazing work getting the languages into the state schools but it’s still hard for people to actually have the chance to encounter the languages for themselves. Most people are likely to encounter the Classics through translation these days for the first time. Sometimes I think they absolutely do get inspired to learn the languages for themselves, to become translators and yeah, I’ve seen my own students have a real interest in feminist translations definitely.
Eleanor:
Then I just wanted to ask, is feminist translation a popular topic within the world of classical academia right now?
Jennifer:
Yeah, I think it very much is. There are a couple of new volumes that have just come out on women creating classical texts. I’m trying to think what the full titles are for those and completely failing – I’m sorry. I don’t think the word ‘feminist’ crops up in the title at all, but I think there’s clearly a feminist angle to what’s happening there, both from the women who are creating Classics and the classical scholars who are interested in looking at what these people responding to the Classics are doing. So yeah, I think there’s a very strong feminist angle. It’s very much a hot topic in Classics at the moment which is a wonderful thing.
Eleanor:
Yeah, I think we’ll end it on that note so thank you for coming today.
Jennifer:
Thank you.